


Dead Heat

by Spartapuss



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon, Gen, My First AO3 Post, Oneshot, Rôti, Seizure, Thing - Freeform, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 20:05:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spartapuss/pseuds/Spartapuss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Basically a very descriptive stream-of-concious version of the events at the end of Roti, focused on what Will is seeing/the method behind his madness.<br/>(Mainly written because I was so traumatised after the ep, I  had to write my own version of it to calm myself down.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Heat

White snow crunching under his shoes. The black stag luring him into the all-consuming darkness. 

A beat-up old car. An enemy. Garrett Jacob Hobbs. A gun. Dr Lecter’s home; all sharp glass planes and clinical surfaces. 

Nauseating heat building up within himself, an aching pressure against his bruised mind. It’s getting so, so hard to think. Perspiration saturates the back of his shirt.

Will hears himself pleading with Hannibal, disconnected somehow from his own mouth. The words slur and wobble in pitch. 

“I feel like I’m losing my mind, I… I- I don’t know what’s real…” 

He can’t quite make out the individual words, but he knows that Hannibal is launching into his whole psychiatrist spiel; and he can’t stand it.

“No I don’t care who I am, just tell me… if he’s real.”

“Who do you see Will?” Hannibal isn’t answering his question. It must be Garrett Jacob Hobbs. It has to be. Will wants so badly to believe in his own senses, that it’s not just another hallucination, but the persistent heat just behind his eyes is growing, blooming, blossoming - like an invasive parasite spreading its tendrils into memories and vision and speech centres, and oh God, why can’t he form a coherent thought anymore?

“Garrett Jacob Hobbs. Who do you see?” It’s obvious, it’s obvious, surely. 

A moment, a lifetime, then, finally, the silky smooth answer: “I don’t see anyone.”

There’s a roaring in Will’s ears, a fiery creature raging and confused. It uncurls deep within his brain, and lashes out blindly, flames flickering and laying waste to the storm-wracked landscape of his mind. 

“No, he’s right there.” he whimpers.

Hannibal’s words are like lightning strikes crashing down onto already parched ground. He tries to rein the frightened beast in, but he’s panicking, and he’s terrified; like a wild deer trapped in a burning forest. 

“There’s no one there Will.”

“No, no - you’re lying.” 

“We are alone, you came here alone - don’t you remember coming here?” 

No no no, lies on top of lies, delusions, he’s not listening, he doesn’t remember. He wasn’t alone - he came with Garrett Jacob Hobbs, Garrett drove the car.

“Please, don’t lie to me!” he cries, voice cracking, gun hand trembling violently. He is panting frantically for breath; short, sharp gasps which give him no relief. 

“Garrett Jacob Hobbs is dead. You killed him; you watched him die.”

Garrett with the bullet holes in his chest Garrett with the milky blue marbles for eyes Garrett with rotting skin and pale flesh in tatters. 

The chair is suddenly empty; Garrett Jacob Hobbs flickers and vanishes, leaving... what? What has Will been pointing his gun at? Who has he been talking to? Nothing, no one, nobody. The room bends and shifts, like ocean waves are swelling and churning behind the richly panelled walls.

“What’s happening to me?” He moans, clawing at his burning skin. His head is on fire. Is this how the Angel-Maker saw him? Did he even meet the Angel-Maker, or was that all a hallucination too? They’re all dead. All gone. His tremors are building towards a shuddering crescendo. His breath starts to hitch in his throat.

“Will…Will! You’re having an episode. I want you to hand me the gun…”

But he is vibrating out of this universe, shaking his body loose from the constraints of its own molecular structure, and his ears can no longer interpret sounds into coherent thought.  
Hannibal watches on coolly as Will’s eyes roll back into his head, revealing the twitching whites beneath, the muscles of his body locked in myoclonic spasm.

The ravenous flames held back by a fragile barrier of stability smash through and consume him at last, and the last dregs of Will’s consciousness are sent screaming into the last desperate refuges of his brain which remain untouched by the agonising heat. Though he is no longer conscious, neither is he completely unconscious.

There is only terrible, debilitating pain in one great flood. It is all he can think of, it is his whole existence. 

Then come waves upon waves of throbbing pain. In between them, Will thrashes for the surface, straining for tiny gulps of air in between the blackness.

After an interminable age, there is only a slow trickle of pain, draining sluggishly away. Sodden, he heaves one arm, then two, onto the miserable scrap of shore. Will drags himself out with a monumental effort, and is utterly spent. A dull greyness begins to dawn on the horizon. 

“Will…"

"Can you hear me? Will?” 

A familiar voice. It’s something to reach out for, a life ring thrown from that other world. Will grasps it, clutches it tight, and lets it pull him out of the last of that bleak night.  
He slowly regains control of his muscles, but no longer has the strength to keep them so rigidly contracted. His legs buckle under him and he falls. Only he doesn’t, because strong arms are there to catch him, and guide him gently to a chair into which he collapses, sweating and shaky.

“Will, repeat after me. My name is Will Graham.”

He does so, in a hoarse, rasping voice, and then raises his arms weakly as requested by Hannibal. He tastes metal, and the salt tang of fear and sweat, an old duo come calling again.

“Although you may not feel like it, I need you to smile.”

Disbelievingly, Will looks up at Hannibal with eyes hooded from exhaustion. Slowly, unnaturally, he draws back the corners of his lips into a tortured caricature of a smile. For some strange reason, Dr Lecter smiles back. Is he… enjoying this? Will is too worn-out to give this any more thought, but he is disturbed nonetheless.

“It wasn’t a stroke. You may have had a seizure. Tell me the last thing you remember.”

He combs the grey cobwebs of his frayed memory for an answer. A face. An enemy. He glances about the room wildly. Though Will is beginning to recover slightly, he can feel the suffocating heat rising within him once more.

“I…I was with Garrett Jacob Hobbs…”

“You have a fever. You were hallucinating; you thought he was alive, here, in the room with you.” Hannibal says smoothly.

“But I saw him…” His confusion manifests as an ache behind his eyes.

“He’s a delusion disguising reality. Don’t let that let you slip away.”

But Will is already slipping. His feverish grasp on reality is slick with sweat, and his mind goes blank for a few long seconds. When he returns to himself, Hannibal is preparing to leave to find Alana.

“Alana…” He tries to rouse himself from the stupor he has fallen into, but Dr Lecter quashes his feeble attempt. He sees Hannibal’s lips move - though he doesn’t hear it - and gathers that he must stay. Frustration at his inability to function washes through him as the Doctor leaves the room. 

Will rubs a hand tiredly over his face - Hannibal was right, he is running abnormally hot -even for him - and his eyes are unable to focus clearly. He concentrates hard on a fuzzy black shape which is swimming around on the table top. A phone? No, it’s bigger and bulkier than that. He frowns, and slumps his body awkwardly over the table to grab whatever it is. His searching hand is met with the cold steel of the 9mm handgun - of course, he brought it here. He gives the empty chair at the head of the table a fleeting look, and feels a lurch in the pit of his stomach. Not real. Not there.

But Hannibal has gone, and Will stands, leaning heavily on the table. He needs to find Alana to warn her about Garrett. Or Gideon. He just needs to find her, and then everything will be okay.  
Will stumbles outside into the freezing night, and the bitter wind immediately whips around him. On any other occasion this would make him shiver and tuck his scarf around his neck just a bit more securely, but now it cools the fevered skin of his forehead and caresses his overheating body. This affords him a brief few moments of clarity, which he uses to point himself in the general direction of Alana’s house and start walking. Everything will be okay.

The wind howls, and the snow crunch, crunch, crunches again and again under his numb feet. He feels himself drifting along, and struggles to keep hold of his sanity. He can hear the stag with the raven feathers just behind him, snorting impatiently. He can see it out of the corner of his eye placing its hooves delicately into the trail of muddled footprints Will has left, and puffing out indignant bursts of hot moss-scented steam as it follows him. But when he stops, turns, looks, there is nothing. Just Will Graham alone in the snow.

And there is Alana’s house, with its warm yellow lights shining through the wide windows and welcoming him home. He staggers on, on hands and knees at times, because sometimes the ground rushes up to meet him unexpectedly. His trousers are soaked with icy water and cling freezing to his legs like a second skin, but he stopped noticing it a while ago.  
A figure in the distance. An enemy. Garrett Jacob Hobbes.

Will raises his gun hand, tries to lock on to the man that threatens Alana, but his vision is getting steadily worse, and his target flutters around aimlessly like a moth around a lamp. Besides, he can’t shoot a man in the back. Can he? Will doesn’t know anymore. He used to have all these ideals and principles, but too much time spent in the minds of psychopaths has eroded his boundaries to questionable stubs. No... Not yet, at least.

He trips forwards; legs stubborn and refusing to lift completely clear of the snow drifts, and comes to a stop next to the motionless figure. He doesn’t need to look to know it’s him.  
“I don’t know if I will ever be myself again… I don’t know if I’ve got any self left over. I spent so long thinking I was him, it’s got really hard to remember who I was when I wasn’t.”

Will nods slowly. The convoluted train of thought makes a strange sort of sense to his own unhinged psyche.

“Who are you now?” he asks conversationally, forgetting for a few moments that he’s talking to a cerebral phantasm.

“Now I‘m you. We’re both here, looking at her… It’s those kinds of people that shouldn’t be in a relationship. I’m already committed. It’s hard to be with another person when you can’t get out of your own head.” The apparition is making less and less sense, seemingly unravelling just as fast as his own mind.

“I want to get out.” Oh how Will longs to get out. To be free of this blight, this torment. He closes his eyes. His skin is melting off his body in the heat, sloughing off in sheets under his sweltering clothes. His once neatly coiled thoughts are a tangled jumble of knots and ragged kinks. Hefting the weight of the gun in his palm, he considers release, of a sort. But no, he has the dogs to think of, and Alana, and Abigail. 

“Yeah, well, we all want things that we can’t have.” Will’s eyes are darting, refusing to look directly at Hobbs’ face. In the manner of a cringing dog, what he can’t see can’t hurt him. His headache pounds in his ears, distorts his features, and sets a fierce ache in his jaws.

“But if I killed her like He would kill her… Maybe I could understand him better. I wonder if then you’d finally understand what you’ve become.”

Hobbs stares at him accusingly with his blank unlidded eyes. Unwillingly, Will feels his gaze drawn sideways, and aghast, he beholds the full rotting corpse of the man he killed. In that moment, staring into those dead eyes, Will comes to the sickening realisation that he is already too far gone. They’re both dead men anyway. 

His vision clears slightly in light of his purpose, and he shoots Garrett Jacob Hobbs for the second and final time.

The recoil from the gun jerks his whole torso, and he trips backwards, away from the body of his latest victim and the rapidly spreading pool of blood. Oh God. Oh God no. Something inside his head sparks abruptly like a live wire with a loose connection. Why did he do that? Cold sweat runs in rivulets down the back of his neck. The man lying still and white on the snowy ground has brown hair where Hobbs has a bald pate; is heavy where Hobbs is gaunt; is Gideon, where Hobbs is already long dead and buried.

The gun falls from Will’s nerveless hand.

Twice murderer. All killer. Killerkillerkiller. 

He senses rather than sees Alana rush to the window. With a last flicker of coherent thought, he fervently hopes she didn’t see this last insane performance; his delusional, violent swansong. His knees buckle and Will collapses quietly to the ground, his dimming gaze still locked onto the blood-spattered face of the late Gideon.

Killer.


End file.
